Coelebs by Ethel Mills

John Musgrave sat at his solitary breakfast-table and regarded the covered dishes before him with, for the first time within his memory, so little interest in their contents that he felt a strange disinclination to uncover them. This lack of appetite, he decided, resulted either from indisposition or from approaching age. Since he felt no indisposition, he attributed it to the latter cause. Persons of advancing middle-age were less hearty than youth at the beginning of the day. That was only natural. Therefore he did not lift the covers, but made an indifferent breakfast of toast and coffee.

Nevertheless, as the day advanced, he made the further discomfiting discovery that this lack of interest was not confined solely to the table, but spread itself like a blight over the ordinary affairs of life. He was oddly disinclined to follow any of his usual pursuits. Mr Musgrave was unaccountably bored with everything. He experienced a restlessness foreign to his habitual placidity, which restlessness, by reason of its strangeness, worried him considerably. It was inconceivable that after forty years of tranquil contentment he should develop the quality which of all others he had found so difficult to comprehend or sympathise with. Yet restless he was, and dissatisfied -- dissatisfied, with Moresby and the even tenor of his days. He wanted inexplicably to fling things into a portmanteau and start off for some place -- any place that was fairly distant.